Jim Gaffigan
is Catholic. As he wryly informs us, his wife is “Shiite Catholic.” Does that
make his new book, Dad
Is Fat, Catholic? Is he, as the Washington
Post’s Michelle Boorstein put it, “the
Catholic Church’s newest evangelizer”? Boorstein seems to want to say yes, although Gaffigan’s style is more
subtle than most people would associate with the word “evangelism.” After all,
you won’t hear “Christ, and him crucified” in so many words from Gaffigan.

Sometimes, however, evangelism can have a very different meaning. In
modern America, most people have a certain view of devout Catholicsthey’re
either recent immigrants who will assimilate away from the Church, or they’re repressed
weirdos with strange ideas about sex who probably hate all sorts of people
(women, gays, Muslims, etc.). In any case, they can’t possibly be happy and
well-adjusted.

And yet, there’s Gaffigan. He’s open about being Catholic, although he’s
no Catechism-thumper (not that
there’s anything wrong with that!). He has what many peopleespecially his
neighbors in the Bowery in Manhattanwould consider an unimaginably large
family (five kids!) and, while he seems tired, he also clearly thinks the kids
are worth it. He has a lovely wife who is very attentive to the kids, but apparently
neither he nor she thinks marriage and family detract from the enjoyment of
life. In fact, he seems pretty happy and not nearly as neurotic as most of the
other comics you’ll see doing specials on Comedy Central. In fact, despite his
acquisition of fame, he seems pretty normal. The thought may even begin to
creep in: maybe he’s happy because of
all the weird stuff that look like trappings of his kooky religion. And once that thought’s present, it’s not too
far away from the thought: maybe it’s not so kooky after all.

That being said, most of Gaffigan’s comedy is not about the Catholic
faith. As a matter of fact, he never seems terribly interested in making
Catholicism a subject of his comedy, except for the occasional joke about how
long Mass is or that Catholics have guilt. That’s why his stand-up and his new
book, Dad is Fat, are so deliciously
subversive. The things that keep people out of the pews these days are not
usually disagreements with the Church about the Trinity or about the role of
Mary in the economy of salvation. Usually, it’s because they think the Church
is some combination of outdated and unjust (Catholics hate sex, women, gays,
Republicans, Democrats, etc.). And nowhere is the Church more outdated
(apparently) or unjust (seemingly) than in the area of family life. And nowhere
is Gaffigan’s comedy more supportive of the Church’s mission to contemporary
America than when he is talking about his wife, his kids, and how happy they’ve
made him.

There’s no secret that fatherhood is in trouble in America. The
statistics show it and the canaries in the cultural coal minelike movies and
TV showsshow it. Now, obviously, fatherhood has been declining in America for
a long time. Another comedian, Bill Cosby, wrote a book on Fatherhood, too. Cosby is hilarious and he’s done a lot in his time
to try to shore up fatherhood, especially in the black community. But reading Fatherhood now is striking for two
reasons: first, Cosby’s book fairly drips with social consciousness, so much so
that it almost detracts from the laughs, right down to the earnest essays on
The Importance of Fatherhood by Noted Psychologist Alvin Poussaint, MD, which bookend
Cosby’s humorous take on the subject. Gaffigan’s touch is much lighter. Second,
the cultural crisis of fatherhood looks somewhat different today than it did
when Cosby wrote his book. Either the problems Cosby notes are much more
advanced now than they were in 1986, like the lack of interest in fatherhood
among American men, or there are new problems: most notably, the widespread
refusal of many American men to shoulder much responsibility for anything
outside of their immediate gratification.

The slacker male who shows up in Judd Apatow movies is a real problem:
this guy isn’t only unable to take on the burden of fatherhood, he can’t even stir
his stumps away from the Xbox and his folks’ basement. It’s no surprise,
really. These are the children of divorce who grew up thinking fathers were
basically like Homer Simpson: lazy, hen-pecked (in his own estimation),
self-interested, absent to his children, neglectful of his wife, and completely
ineffective around the house.

Here’s the great thing about Gaffigan: he’s a recovering slacker male. He
explains, “Getting
married and becoming the father of young children has taught me that I am a
narcissist. The good news is that I am a really great, really important, and
really special narcissist. I lived my life as a single man, and even for a few
years into parenthood, just looking out for number one.” As a result, he says,
“My perceived needs were all-important. When it came to my career,
relationship, or taking the last piece of pizza, I was only thinking about
myself. And, of course, the pizza.” But marriage and children change you. Your
wife and kids draw you out of yourself. Your own needs and desires are
subordinated to the needs of the family.

From the
outside, that looks like the end of fun. Gaffigan amusingly describes the way
his single friends react when they find out he has kids: “I watch the faces of
single people in their twenties after I bring up that I ‘have children.’ I
imagine them taking a small step backward as if to avoid contagion, with a look
of ‘Sorry to hear that’ on their face. Like I naively volunteered to contract
leprosy, forever quarantining myself from the world of having fun by having
children.” For these people and for pre-marital Gaffigan, children are like the
end of the world, except less exciting. The magic of Gaffigan’s book is how it
shows that not only is this perception not true, but that his kids have made
him far happier and a better person to boot.

To the typical
American male, fatherhood seems like a death sentence. In one of the more
direct passages of the book, Gaffigan addresses the average Joe directly,
answering the question he gets often: why have so many children? “Well, why
not? I guess the reasons against having more children always seem uninspiring and
superficial. What exactly am I missing out on? Money? A few more hours of
sleep? A more peaceful meal? More hair? These are nothing compared to what I
get from these five monsters who rule my life. I believe each of my five
children has made me a better man. So I figure I only need another thirty-four
kids to be a pretty decent guy. Each one of them has been a pump of light into
my shriveled black heart. I would trade money, sleep, or hair for a smile from
one of my children in a heartbeat. Well, it depends on how much hair.” In other
words, what else am I doing with my time? How could I think that anything could
be better than being a dad (even a fat dad)?

The question
is also acute for women, maybe even more acute for women. Now, Gaffigan’s book
can be read by women and women will find it funny and insightful. But even when
he speaks about women, it always seems to be with an eye toward men as his
addressees. When women have babies, of course, they lose time working on their
careers and, at least to some degree and temporarily, they lose their good
looks. What could be more valuable to a slacker male than a women who is hot
and can pay for his Xbox Live subscription? Why would he want to give that up?
Why would the woman in question? But the question doesn’t penetrate very
deeply, not even getting to the point of asking the obvious follow-up question:
well, why did my mother have me? Why did she think I was worth it? Aren’t I good? Aren’t people good? Don’t we want
more of them around? Aren’t babies cute and loveable? And maybe even more
interesting, at least sometimes, than Halo
4?

It is the
very loveableness and goodness of children than make men better. Gaffigan seems in awe of his kids, as well as
frustrated and driven up various walls by them, and it is responding to their
needs that have made him less selfish. The sweetest and the most important
parts of the book, however, are reserved for his wife, Jeannie. Obviously, it
takes two to tango: there are no kids without the mommy and the daddy. And pre-Jeannie
Jim did not seem, even to himself, a particularly viable prospect as a dad, or
even as a husband capable of living with one woman for his whole life. His love
for Jeannie is the prod he needs to shake off the languor of slackerdom.
Interestingly, that love is not a love confined to Jeannie’s looks or to
romance. Instead, he notices, “For the first time in my life, I felt like I
could spend the rest of my life with someone. Heck, I could even have a child
with this person.” Jim’s love for Jeannie extends to the desire to spend his
life with her and, almost inexorably, to children.

That brings
up perhaps the most subversive part of the book: how Jim views Jeannie. Their
marriage is not Leave it to Beaver-land.
As a matter of fact, he gently criticizes his own father for embodying Ward
Cleaver’s distance from his kids (while not having much of Ward’s wisdom). Jim
and Jeannie’s marriage is clearly very modern. They share duties around the
house, with Jim being responsible for the occasional trips to the park,
birthday parties, picking up kids from school, etc. Meanwhile Jeannie maintains
a busy professional life, editing Jim’s writing, brainstorming for his stand-up
jokes, and producing his TV specials. Nevertheless, when Jim expresses the most
amazement about Jeannie, it tends to be about her abilities and temperament as
grounded in her femininity and womanhood.
He cribs a line from his stand-up routines at one point, writing:

But truly, women are amazing. Think about it this way: a woman can
grow a baby inside her body. Then a woman can deliver the baby through her
body. Then, by some miracle, a woman can feed a baby with her body. When you
compare that to a male’s contribution to life, it’s kind of embarrassing,
really. The father is always like, “Hey, I helped, too. For like five seconds.
Doing the one thing I think about twenty-four hours a day. Well, enjoy your
morning sicknessI’m going to eat this chili. Mmmm, smell those onions.”

It’s almost
as if Jim’s love for Jeannie has something to do with sexual complementarity!
It’s almost as though sexual difference is what draws men and women together!
The very things that generations of radical feminists have decried as the
biological and social bases of women’s oppression are what Jim finds amazing
about Jeannie and, mirabile dictu, what
Jeannie seems to glory in as well. Yet Jim and Jeannie would probably dare you
to say she’s not a successful, liberated woman. After all, as Jim says later in
the book, they’re happy, and, “Being happy is really the definition of success,
isn’t it?” Even the common opinion about women losing their looks when they
have kids gets a second look from married, father-of-five Jim: “When you see a
gorgeous woman, and then you find out she’s had a bunch of kids, doesn’t it
make her like a hundred times hotter?”

The last
thing to be said about Dad is Fat is
that it’s funny: really, uproariously funny. Even so, laughs per minute don’t
necessarily mean that the comedian is a good comedian. So many comedians depend
on the anxious laughter of blasphemy, the uncomfortable laughter of gross-out
jokes, or the nervous laughter of speaking about sex out in the open. These are
ways to get cheap laughs and oftentimes obscure the fact that the comedian just
isn’t very good. Gaffigan’s humor is different, based on real insights into how
ridiculous human beings often are. But even as he skewers, Gaffigan never
descends into cynicism; he’s always affectionate, even when he’s frustrated or
even affronted. He does, however, shy away from the “family-friendly” label
even though he’s known as a “clean” comedian. After all, “As a parent, I know
‘family-friendly’ is really just a synonym for bad. Family-friendly restaurants serve horrible food.
Family-friendly hotels have the charm of a water park. Really, anything with the word family before it is bad. Have you been
in a ‘family restroom’? They always seem like they should be connected to a gas
station.”

Gaffigan
would probably be the last person to argue that he’s some kind of evangelist.
That’s not really what he’s trying to do. Just like a good novelist, a good
comedian has to avoid being didactic. Gaffigan’s comedy doesn’t flow directly
from a desire to make disciples of all nations. Instead, his comedy expresses
what he sees. What strikes him as funny is without a doubt shaped by who he is
as a man, as a husband, as a father, and, yes, as a Catholic. The world does
still need missionaries, Francis Xavier types; but it’s also good there are Jim
Gaffigans out there. He may not mean to point out how absurd the objections to
the Church’s support of marriage, fatherhood, and big families are or, by
implication, how wise the Church’s teaching is that fatherhood is a vocation
that fulfills men and makes them happy. At the same time, he can’t seem to help
it and, while having kids might not be contagious, Gaffigan’s obvious joy in
being a father certainly is.

Dad Is Fat, by Jim Gaffigan

Crown Archetype, 2013
274 pages
Hardcover

About the Author

Thomas P. Harmon

Thomas P. Harmon is assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

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